Review by Choice Review
Consensus that child welfare fails our children is widespread, e.g., Leroy Pelton's For Reasons of Poverty (CH, Jun'90), Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward's Regulating the Poor (CH, Nov'71), and Lisbeth Schorr's Within Our Reach (1988). Hagedorn's book joins this depressing chorus but takes a different path to problem analysis and reform possibilities. Because Hagedorn spent several years attempting services reform in Milwaukee, he focuses on bureaucracy as the source of system failure as well as the target for reform. After a vivid, personal introduction to Milwaukee's system, he analyzes the history of social services through the lens of bureaucratic theory. This examination of social welfare bureaucratic structures should be required reading for professionals. The last section describes Hagedorn's failed reform efforts with a remarkably optimistic tone. He believes that significant reform is possible at the "street-level" of bureaucracy, without waiting for national reform. The author's scholarship and personal honesty combine to make this a valuable contribution to the literature on the failure of social service. His well-written book will be intellectually stimulating and easily understood by concerned citizens as well as students, faculty, and professionals. Highly recommended. M. E. Elwell emerita, Salisbury State University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Hagedorn shifts his focus from street gangs in People and Folks (1989) to bureaucracies designed to aid the nation's children. In 1988, Hagedorn was hired to reorganize the children's services sector of the Milwaukee County Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). He immediately found himself up against an immovable bureaucracy, one that was not helping the children under its care. Here Hagedorn combines a narrative of his time at DHHS with scholarly work on the nature of welfare bureaucracies to effectively argue that the nation's "child welfare system doesn't work for poor families." The welfare bureaucracy and its "heavily unionized" caseworkers continue to enrich themselves on ever-growing budgets, while those who they should help are suffering. That the system has recently taken up the banner of child abuse is, in Hagedorn's opinion, an attempt to garner more funding. A penetrating critique of a system gone terribly awry. --Brian McCombie
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
Social scientist Hagedorn's fieldwork study covers a two-and-one-half-year stint as an "involved observer" in the Youth Initiative pilot program (which he coordinated) of the Milwaukee County Department of Social Services. Despite the program's failure to change fundamentally the major activities of social workers from a punitive, family-disruptive approach, Hagedorn remains a strong proponent of Lisbeth Schoor's (Within Our Reach, LJ 6/15/88) argument that support can be garnered for programs that provide, instead, community-based family-strengthening support services. Even with the entrenchment of social work bureaucracies and general public attitudes, the author argues that the Initiative could still provide a blueprint for change, but it would have to be demonstrably persuasive to wean the American people from their advocacy of the "politics of punishment" when it comes to child welfare programs. Recommended for the general public as well as for professionals and academics.Suzanne W. Wood, SUNY Coll. of Technology, Alfred (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Choice Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Library Journal Review
